A Small Country
- Title Page
- Introduction
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- Copyright
A Small Country
Siân James
Introduction by Stan Barstow
Introduction
We know we are in a real and fully apprehended world the moment we hear the railway porter’s voice on page one of Siân James’ absorbing novel. With what sureness she launches her tale. It is a model opening. If it has famously been said (though I can never remember by whom) that good dialogue should do three things – reveal character, convey information and move the story along – here it is in the hands of a writer of high skill. And if the years in which her story is set were before her own time she nevertheless manages to convey throughout the authenticity of a life known, felt and closely observed.
The railway porter is garrulous. Siân James is not. As my gaze drifts idly over the great slabs of fiction on airport bookshelves nowadays I am irresistibly reminded of the man who apologized to his correspondent when he said, winding up: “I’m sorry I’ve written you such a long letter, but I didn’t have time to write a short one”. Verbosity is not one of Siân James’ characteristics, which is why she is also such a good short-story writer. There are many, many lesser talents who (most of them incapable of anything else) might have drawn out her story to twice the length of
A Small Country
and, regrettably, attracted many times the audience from that readership which is never happier than when plodding along to the sounds of every ‘t’ being crossed, every ‘i’ dotted.
When Siân James brings you a scene full-face it pulses with life and physical passion; but often she will let another scene occur off-stage and merely report it in summary. So with her characters. Some we comprehend more thoroughly than others. We believe the rage of love which brings together the errant Josi Evans and his tragic mistress, Miriam; but do we know them through and through? Mrs James is not in the business of psychoanalysis, and their predicament is the more poignant for what is left unsaid, “The heart has its reasons...” The sense of life going on at the edges of her story, and outside it, lends what she tells an unstrained conviction.
We are in deepest rural Wales just before the First World War and among people of substance and standing. Rachel Griffiths rejected the man her father approved of her marrying for the son of one of his tenant farmers. Not that Josi Evans ever sought material advantage; and whatever drew him to Rachel has for some time now not been enough. A child born to his schoolteacher mistress resolves him to break free of his marriage. His grown children by Rachel look on with a bitterness that turns to pity and compassion as the tragedy of this relationship is played out.
The war, when it comes, seems so distant. Everyone talks as if it will be over in a few months. But gradually its tentacles reach out to draw them in. Tom, the son, just home from Oxford and with a farm to run now that his father has left, nevertheless feels impelled to volunteer; Catrin, his young sister, disappointed in her love for Tom’s English friend Edward (who has already joined up), leaves home for the demanding life of a nurse. Ironically, at the novel’s end with Rachel dead also, it is Josi who comes closest to real peace; Josi tuned to the pulse of life in a way that others can only envy, among them his son, Tom, who observes him after his defection: “There was little ceremony about his father; no fuss, no show. He suddenly saw him resting at the side of a hedge, his whole body completely relaxed so that he seemed almost a part of the landscape. He seemed extraordinarily at peace with himself; even at the present time, with his life completely disrupted...”. Siân James creates moments of great tenderness between Josi and the young servant girl, Lowri, whom he asks to share his future, and shows a gift for corrective comedy in the reaction of the aged Grandfather after the wedding:
‘Are you going to the war?’ the old man asked.
‘Too old, man,’ Josi said.
‘Too old?’ The old man cleared his throat noisily.
‘You think I should fight do you?’ Josi asked amiably.
‘For the bloody English. No.’ The little man spat squarely into the flames.
‘They wanted me to fight once; against the Russians, I think, or the Turks. Not I. My family fight against the bloody English, not for them...’
‘Lloyd-George is a good little man to my way of thinking,’ Josi said peaceably, ‘and he’s one of the English now.’
‘Turn-coat from the North.’
‘Good little man to my way of thinking,’ Josi said again. ‘Not my business, though. Not today.’
The old man spun round to face him, the light of understanding in his eyes at last.
‘You’re the bridegroom, are you?’
‘Aye,’ Josi said. ‘That’s right.’
‘You old ram.’
It is, perhaps, in Edward’s letter to Catrin, written from the trenches, that the heart of
A Small Country
is expressed: “Life can’t be so frail that it can be quenched by a stray bullet or a piece of shrapnel. Surely it can’t. There must be something more. It has taken a war to make me recognize the eternal in life, the river that flows through us all, so that there is no real end.”
A small country, a lost world, the people we have met long dead, yet living still in the great onward flow of human steadfastness, determination and survival.
Siân James’ novel needs no inflated length: it grows in the mind.
Stan Barstow
ONE
Catrin got down from the trap and looped the pony’s reins over the post outside the station.
Ah, yes, a lovely girl, the porter said to himself as he watched her walking along the road to the main entrance. Paper-white brow,
hair blue as a blackbird’s wing. Who could describe the curve of her body as she walked? No one. Even ap Gwilym couldn’t describe the
body of a queenly young girl. Her body takes me from God, he’d said. Well, that was one way out of it. Her smile the five delights.
‘She’s on time tonight, Miss Evans,’ he called out. ‘Seven and a half minutes late at Ammanford. Your brother, is it? Good. He’ll be home for the hay. One thing about these colleges, they give the boys a chance to help with the hay-making and the harvest. If they let them stop for the potato lifting as well, you’d get more of them going after an education. My poor sister’s boy, now. He could pass any examination in the world, Miss Evans. He wrote a history of the three parishes for our Christmas Day Eisteddfod last year, and do you know what the adjudicator said about it? “This entry merits not a silver cup but a crock of gold.” Aye indeed, a fine brain. But what would his mother do without him, that’s the rub, isn’t it?’
Catrin nodded her head sympathetically. It was a still, green evening. Even in the little station the scents of summer were all about her; grass and clover and hawthorn.
‘Couldn’t manage, Miss Evans, that’s the truth of it. Five younger ones, you see. Couldn’t manage. Even if they gave him one of these scholarships, they wouldn’t give his mother a man in his place, would they?’
No one else on the platform. Sounds of summer in the little market town. Thrushes singing in the trees flanking the other side of the line. A horse clop-clopping lazily back to its stable. Children still out, playing and shouting on Llanybyther Road. ‘Barley. Barley’. That was the only word she could hear distinctly. A dog barking somewhere.
‘The knights used that word,’ she told the porter. ‘
Barley
. In their tournaments.’ She felt ashamed of her silence. So few people had time to talk to him. Only those marooned for hours between trains. His wife was dead.
It was the word the knights had used to call truce. It had survived for six centuries, its meaning virtually unchanged. The thought entranced her.
It didn’t impress Mr Thomas, though, ‘English Knights they’d be no doubt,’ he said.
He took off his cap and scratched his head. ‘
Halen
,’ he said. ‘
Salt
. A simple enough word, Miss Evans. A word that’s been in our language since we first came to this island in prehistoric times, a Celtic word you might say. Now,
swllt
,
shilling
, the same stem but borrowed centuries later when the Roman legionaries tramped these hills.
Swllt
was salt money, wages. The same word arriving by different posts. There’s a thought, now.’
Catrin nodded at him again.
‘What name,’ he said, ‘do you give that animal of yours out there?’
‘Bella’
‘No, no, Miss Evans. I mean, what generic name do you give her?’
The train, under its neat puff of white smoke, suddenly appeared in the distance, saving Catrin from the necessity of venturing an answer.
‘There he is,’ she said, ‘Tom.’
Her brother had the window down, was leaning out and waving at her.
‘I’ll go along and get his box,’ Mr Thomas said.
‘Where’s Father, then?’ Tom asked as he got out on to the platform. He looked about him as he brushed his lips against her forehead.
‘I’ve come instead,’ Catrin said. ‘Won’t I do?’
‘But where’s Father? He’s always met me before.’
‘Have you got a sixpence for Mr Thomas?’
‘No, I thought Father would be here.’
‘Haven’t you got anything?’
‘Welcome home, Mr Evans. Time for a bit of real work now, is it? Oh no thank you, Miss Evans. Not on any account in the world. I’ll see your father in The Sheaf one of these days. “You owe me a pint, Mr Evans,” I’ll say to him, bold as cock robin. Don’t you worry, Miss Evans. Now, I’ve put the trunk in the office. That’s right, isn’t it? You’ll send for it tomorrow? Good. You’ll be getting a motor-car soon, Mr Evans, I’ve no doubt. Emlyn John, Mr Ebenezer’s son, you know, has got a beauty. Cost I don’t know how much. The practice is going to the dogs though, they say. Well, what young man wants to be pulling teeth all day when he can be underneath an engine or thundering round the countryside, isn’t it. He’ll settle down soon, I dare say. No, I don’t know what make it is, Mr Evans. Twelve horse-power though, he told me. I remember that. Twelve horse-power. Ah, but they don’t tell you the nature and the spirit of the horse, do they? These men making their motor-cars in London, are they thinking about Mrs Gwynfor’s Dolly or the Cribyn Flier, that’s what I’d like to know. What sort of a horse have they got in mind? You find out, Mr Evans, before you buy yours.’
Bella trotted out smartly on the five-mile return journey, Tom now holding the reins.
He glanced at Catrin again. He knew she was considered good-looking, but it had never struck home to him until now. Now, as she sat next to him, staring in front of her at the road, she looked ... startling in beauty, splendid somehow, like a figure on the prow of a ship. Splendid and ... rather tragic. What was the matter with her?
‘Where’s Father?’ he asked again.
‘He’s left.’